CREATING ART THE AMATEUR WAY

A while ago I covered a pair of flowery china vases with a rough texture Ronseal 'smooth finish filla' and then painted them with Annie Sloan 'Graphite' chalk paint.  Yesterday, I decided to apply Annie Sloan gold leaf to them. I daubed the vases with 'Gold Size' and when that dried I applied the gold leaf (they are brass actually) onto the size. I protected them with clear wax. I rather like the result.  Disaster befell me a week or so ago when the plastic tap-in wall hooks which held up all my art frames began to crash spontaneously to the floor. They had been in place for a year or two and suddenly the hook parts began to snap off!  I had to take all my paintings down, to be safe, and rethink the situation. Certainly I will not be using those wall hooks again, at least not for frames with glass in them!  While they were down, I decided to paint a lot of the frames black. That brought about the decision to decorate the vases black and gold. See? 😐

I painted this Red Capped Crane a while ago using Schmincke Horadam watercolours. I decided yesterday that I wanted it to form a group of paintings on my wall, all with a similar oriental theme so today I touched it up a little, making the sun a bit redder, adding flag iris and a couple of koi carp for the bird to focus on. I then coloured the paintings frame with Annie Sloan 'Graphite' to match the frames for the other two paintings, shown below.  Watercolour paintings with oriental theme  

As we all know, art isn't just applying watercolour, oil, or acrylic to a canvas. A couple of years ago I got chalk-paint madness and I decorated every single piece of furniture in my home with it, as well as ornaments and lamps. I even decorated garden pots with it. This is a Mexican clay urn which developed a huge crack in it. Reluctantly, I made the decision to paint it and I'm glad I did.  First I sealed the crack in the urn with polyfilla and added a layer on the base so that it was stable when stood upright and no longer supported by the original stand. When that had set I covered the entire pot with Annie Sloan 'Old White'.  While still wet, I took a small sea sponge and dunked it alternately in Annie Sloan 'Graphite' and Hemway 'Pastel Blue' and kept on dabbing the white with the dark grey and blue until I got the desired effect. When finished and the chalk paint was dry, I went over it with a protective layer of Annie Sloan 'Clear Wax' a...

This is actually a work in progress and it has been on hold for a long time while I forget it about it and then I remember and wonder if I should leave it, add to it, and so on.  I thought it was time to bring it into the light on this Chinese New Year of the Dragon. It has been painted on almost a full sheet of heavyweight watercolour paper and was originally intended to be a diptych. This might just be the year I finish it. 

This is a painting of autumn leaves using Sennelier paint on white Arches cold press paper, 140lb. The funniest thing, I can't quite remember how I did it. I think I drew a lot of leaf shapes, painted them vibrantly using two colours on each, then between them in black. Then, to give depth, I used transparent paint for leaf shapes over some of the black areas so that the black would show through. The detail and outlining of the leaves would be done by pen. Finally, a splash of various coloured paint over the entire painting.